"...there are more people in Scotland who speak Urdu than Gaelic..." --Vicki Rosenzweig (ca. 1993)

A stray dog loitering by the body of its car-hit companion.

"Such was the horror for the profession of a soldier which had affected the minds of the degenerate Romans that many of the youth of Italy and the provinces chose to cut off the fingers of their right hand to escape from being pressed into the service; and this strange expedient was so commonly practiced as to deserve the severe animadversion of the laws, and a peculiar name in the Latin language." --Gibbon

"There ought to be a proportion betwixt the sign and thing signified; therefore should all things, whether real or rationall, have their proper words assigned unto them." --Thomas Urquhart, Logopandecteision

"No pen can any thing eternall wright,
That is not steept in humor of the Night." --George Chapman

"...St Anthony was greeted by Paul the Hermit in the mountainous deserts of Egypt, 'Tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race; if new roofs be risen in the ancient cities; whose empire is it now sways the world; and if any still survive, snared in the error of the demons.' " --Philip J Davis, The Thread (1983)

"Jewel or shell, or starry ore" --Tennyson

"...nobody has yet imagined a plausible Wallace Stevens." --Hugh Kenner

"The words the Hittites used for the verb 'to put on', as in 'to put on an article of clothing', was different for each garment." --Atlantic 8/92

"Poets arguing about modern poetry: jackals snarling over a dried-up well." --Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

(I'm always surprised that anybody reads what i write.)

"When he went to Palestine, Buber fought for the rights of Arabs, but did not prevail; had he done so, the history of the Middle East would have been different." --Martin Seymour-Smith

'As soon as a thought has found words it no longer exists in us or is serious in its deepest sense.' --Schopenhauer, "On Authorship and Style"

My mother was getting something in the dime store when a woman was caught trying to shoplift. She ran away--leaving her child behind.

'The history of mathematics is a road lined with sphinxes...' --Le Lionnais